Musings on books and the book business by an opinionated, somewhat cynical, yet optimistic bookseller.

Monday, December 10, 2007

The Holiday Doldrums

Sunday was a glorious day away from the book business. My wife and I spent the afternoon baking batches of oatmeal raisin and sugar cookies for a book group we attended in the evening. It was an idyllic scene -- until my wife tried to rope me into decorating the Christmas cookies. Isn't it enough that we baked sugar cookies shaped as angels and gingerbread men? Do I have to meticulously coat them with red and green powdered sugar frosting? In protest, I lay on the couch reading the Sunday New York Times, while my wife put the finishing touches on the gingerbread men. By the way, what in the world do gingerbread men have to do with Jesus or Santa Claus?

Baking was a great respite from the doom and gloom of the holiday season at the bookstore. The momentum that the store had built up at the end of November with its strong post-Thanksgiving sales quickly dissipated last weekend under a blanket of snow and sub-freezing temperatures. I spent most of Saturday on the selling floor searching for customers to help. There were some shoppers, and they were very grateful for the assistance and guidance I was able to provide, but I really shouldn't have to look for the customers. We should be so busy on the afternoon of December 8th that people should be accosting me at every turn. On a really rocking day, they trail behind me like a line of baby ducks, with shopping lists clutched in their mitten-covered hands and looks of desperation on their faces.

I couldn't help but think, as I watched all those flakes fall outside of the store's front door and accumulate on the bricks of the walking mall, that I should be up in the mountains cross-country skiing. It must be beautiful up there in the stately pine trees, I fantasized, as yet another version of "The Little Drummer Boy" played over the store's sound system. It must be peaceful among the silent drifts of snow.

Even more disheartening than missing a fine day of skiing was doing the ordering this morning. We aren't out of any important books. We aren't even close to sold out of anything. This makes my job easier, and I don't have the anxiety about missing potential sales because of sold-out titles, but the truth is that I crave the excitement of having to restock the store after a busy Christmas weekend. I get in by 7:30 a.m. and start calling the various warehouses and publishers seeking books. I'll second-day air titles, perhaps I'll even over-night a particularly hot title. Shipping fees be damned, our customers need their books. Not this morning. Instead, I looked across the desk to our recommended buyer and asked her if anything was really taking off in her sections. She mentioned all the overstock we had.

It's now December 10th, and there still isn't a hot hardback title this season. We have a few paperbacks moving, but no new book has captured the imagination of our independent and literary-minded readers. Sometimes, I wonder if we are at the beginning of a sea change in this industry. In Christopher Anderson's book The Long Tail, he discusses how selling a few copies of many different items will be the way of the future. I'm a believer in the long tail, I just didn't think the head and neck would get chopped off in the process.

Are books going the way of music and television? I don't mean the digitization (even though it's hard to make it through a party these days without being asked about Amazon's wireless book reader, The Kindle), but the market fragmentation. Music is just a series of niche genres, with hardly any acts drawing a mass audience. Television is divided into so many channels that no single show can achieve the ratings that the networks used to rack up on a regular basis up until the 1980s. In 1964, the Ed Sullivan show drew an audience of 73 million for the Beatles first appearance. Is there any music group or television show that could even come close to that number now? No way -- even though there are 100 million more people in America now.

Is it possible that the same market forces are tearing at books? Harry Potter and Eat, Pray, Love would seem to argue against it, but everything else seems to point towards a more fragmented market. Is this just the natural result of cultural diversity? Or maybe there simply isn't a general reading public for literary books anymore. Perhaps individual authors and books, like musicians, are appealing to an ever narrower and narrower subset of people.

I don't have the answers to these questions, but it sure makes me uncomfortable that so few literary books seem to strike a chord with a mass audience. It may be that the only titles that work on that level nowadays are James Patterson novels and celebrity biographies. The chains, along with the discounters, have those markets cornered. If mindless formulaic titles are the only books that can really break through the cacophony of sights and sounds in our culture, it could be that mega-bestselling hardbacks will be few and far between for independent book stores. All we will have left is a few popular paperbacks -- and "the tail." You know, it's never a good idea to let the tail wag the beast.

Maybe this weekend I'll bake a pineapple upside down cake. It seems only fitting given the mood that the holidays have put me in.

Favorite 21st Century Novels

Top 10The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. 2000.White Teeth by Zadie Smith. 2000.Atonement by Ian McEwan. 2002.Any Human Heart by William Boyd. 2003.The Known World by Edward P. Jones. 2003.Snow by Orhan Pamuk. 2004.On Beauty by Zadie Smith. 2005.Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. 2006.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. 2007.Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. 2007.

Other FavoritesThe Inventory by Gila Lustiger. 2000.The Human Stain by Philip Roth. 2000.Erasure by Percival Everett. 2001.Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. 2001.Spies by Michael Frayn. 2002.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. 2002.Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon. 2002.Roscoe by William Kennedy. 2002.American Woman by Susan Choi. 2003The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. 2003.Sabbath Creek by Judson Mitcham. 2004.The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. 2004.The In Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji. 2004.The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. 2006.Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. 2006.After This by Alice McDermott. 2006.Echo Maker by Richard Powers. 2006.On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. 2007.Peace by Richard Bausch. 2008.Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. 2008.Border Songs by Jim Lynch. 2009.Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. 2009.Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. 2009.Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. 2009.All Other Nights by Dara Horn. 2009.

My Favorite New Books

My Abandonment by Peter Rock. A girl and her father live off the land in Portland's Forest Park in this novel that is based on a true story. Told through the eyes of the young girl, it's a poetic work revealing our connection to the natural world.True Confections by Katharine Weber. Zip's Candy is the setting for this outstanding satire. Alice, who turns out to be an unreliable narrator, details the company's history and her own place in its scandalous past.New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro. The death of a boar, a pervert trying to perfect his craft, and the unearthing of the bones of a murder victim are just a few of the plot elements in this comic debut.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Shortly after World War II, a young Irish girl is forced by her family to emigrate to Brooklyn. Cut off from all that she knows she finds love at Dodgers games and Coney Island in this subtle but suspenseful novel. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Phillippe Petit's remarkable 1974 tight-rope walk between the World Trade Center towers is the jumping off point (pun intended) of this novel of love, loss and beautiful convergences in a gritty New York City.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Nothing is as it seems in this brilliant bizarre novel set in an almost recognizable New York City. The revelations at the end left me reeling although I knew that surprises were lurking. Another novel with shades of Saul Bellow. Border Songs by Jim Lynch. Hilarious novel about a strange border agent on the Canadian border. Lynch effortlessly tells the story from several points of view including the criminal, the cops and everyone in between.

The Signal by Ron Carlson. An adventure and a love story set in the pristine mountains of Wyoming. A sense of both hope and foreboding hangs over the sparse narrative.

Wanting by Richard Flanagan. This historical novel featuring both Charles Dickens and the explorer John Franklin is really a meditation on desire and what was thought to separate the civilized from the barbarians.

Woodsburner by John Pipkin. Henry David Thoreau burned down the Concord Woods before he wrote Walden. This novel explores that incident from several different perspectives, including a bookseller who is forced to sell porn to stay in business.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. A British Bellow with a West Indian cricket fiend cast as a Chicago University Professor. Humboldt plays cricket.Chicagoby Alaa Al Aswany. Egyptian students and their professors try to navigate America in this magnificent novel set in the heart of contemporary Chicago.

Gossip of the Starlings by Nina de Gramont. A haunting novel about the seductive power of friendship.

Wifeshoppingby Steven Wingate. Thirteen great short stories of men sabotaging their relationships.